All I know is that courses
All I know is that courses are measured by tangents (closest distance between start and finish). Both my marathon's, ALL of my other races, and my own training runs are always longer than the posted distance or MAPED distance (from Google).
This last marathon my watch said I ran 26.73 miles. Now I stopped to pee, take a photo with mom, took some wide turns, but I don't think that equals .53 miles. I know the Garmin GPS watches aren't perfect, but I guess they are close enough for an idea. I like using the overall pace feature on the GPS, but it sucks in a marathon because when I was staying on a 10 min mile pace, I really needed to be at 9:53 pace on my watch to hit 4:22. I ended up being even a little slower than that because at about mile 18, I stopped really looking at my watch and just enjoyed the race. when I add in the extra mile I ran at the begining of the race, I am approaching 28 miles, sounds like and ULTRA to me. HA